After having dropped to limited basic cable I realize that I'm not really paying more than I paid 30 years ago for more local channels (including the digital x.2 and x.3 channels) than existed at that time. It's significantly cheaper after inflation.

I went even further and cut the cord completely, putting up a OTA antenna and supplementing with netflix, redbox and pyTivo. $8/mo for netflix, and about the same (on average) for redbox.

I can't find the article today, but one of the articles I read about this mentioned a "hardware hack" to enable autoskipping on Tivos.

Was that completely bogus? I suspect they were just misinformed and are talking about the 30 second skip, which still requires users to enter the code to enable it. (It's a scan on Premieres by default...)

I've never heard of "auto skipping" on Tivos. I think the "undocumented" backdoor 30 SS hack is as close as we'll get in skipping commercials efficiently.
The end result is the user still has to take action to skip commercials and that is the crux of this issue.
Dish has made it possible to skip commercials without user intervention, and IIRC this is the reason ReplayTV got sued out of business.

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I can't find the article today, but one of the articles I read about this mentioned a "hardware hack" to enable autoskipping on Tivos.

Was that completely bogus? I suspect they were just misinformed and are talking about the 30 second skip, which still requires users to enter the code to enable it. (It's a scan on Premieres by default...)

I've never heard of "auto skipping" on Tivos. I think the "undocumented" backdoor 30 SS hack is as close as we'll get in skipping commercials efficiently.
The end result is the user still has to take action to skip commercials and that is the crux of this issue.
Dish has made it possible to skip commercials without user intervention, and IIRC this is the reason ReplayTV got sued out of business.

ReplayTV (well technically SonicBlue since they owned ReplayTV at the time) got sued due to the Automatic Commercial Advance (CA) technology AND the Internet Sharing technology. The technology ReplayTV used for skipping commercials had been in use for years in VCRs and had never been subject to a lawsuit. While its likely ReplayTV would have still been sued with just CA, I've always felt that the Internet Sharing is really what brought it to the TV Networks attention. And the combination of the 2 was seen as very dangerous. After D&M Holdings settled with the networks, CA was left in while Internet Sharing was removed. Although CA was no longer fully automatic, it required 1 button press to skip an entire commercial break.

As for the "sued out of existence", there were many factors that lead to ReplayTVs demise. While the lawsuit was a certainly a factor, I think it has always been overhyped as a reason.

ReplayTV (well technically SonicBlue since they owned ReplayTV at the time) got sued due to the Automatic Commercial Advance (CA) technology AND the Internet Sharing technology. The technology ReplayTV used for skipping commercials had been in use for years in VCRs and had never been subject to a lawsuit. While its likely ReplayTV would have still been sued with just CA, I've always felt that the Internet Sharing is really what brought it to the TV Networks attention. And the combination of the 2 was seen as very dangerous. After D&M Holdings settled with the networks, CA was left in while Internet Sharing was removed. Although CA was no longer fully automatic, it required 1 button press to skip an entire commercial break.

As for the "sued out of existence", there were many factors that lead to ReplayTVs demise. While the lawsuit was a certainly a factor, I think it has always been overhyped as a reason.

I agree with all this. Early on in 2000 I chose ReplayTV over TiVo because of auto-commercial skip and I'm well aware of everything ReplayTV related and was pretty active in 3rd party development for it including replaySchedule and auto-commercial skip playback using VLC-Videolan player. I always longed for an HD version of ReplayTV but realized at some point that will never happen. There is no good way to condense down to a single phrase what happened to Sonic Blue which is why I also have adopted the "sued out of existence" mantra to summarize what happened though that certainly is nowhere near the whole story.